Digital Pulp Blog

Google has announced that it’s taking into account the speed at which your pages load for ranking search results. They follow by saying that fewer than 1% of search queries are effected by this change. Based on recent estimates from Nielsen that’s still 6 million searches a month so it may be time to take a look at your site’s performance.

Read the full announcement on Google’s Webmaster Blog:

As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.

While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point.

We encourage you to start looking at your site’s speed (the tools above provide a great starting point) — not only to improve your ranking in search engines, but also to improve everyone’s experience on the Internet.